Dr. Donald Reay from Heriot-Watt University, UK presented to EE students the talk - Hands-on Digital Signal Processing- on Dec 8 this Tuesday. The attendees were assumed to have a basic knowledge of C programming and some knowledge of linear systems theory.

The talk intended to give students the opportunity to strengthen their understanding of DSP topics including sampling, reconstruction, and aliasing, FIR and IIR filters, FFT, fast convolution, and adaptive FIR filters through a series of hands-on exercises involving real-time processing of audio signals. Dr Donald Reay started his talk with the ARM Cortex-M4, a microcontroller enhanced for DSP applications. Inexpensive ARM Cortex-M4 based hardware platforms (STMicroelectronics STM32F407 Discovery and Texas Instruments TM4C123 Launchpad) were introduced then. He meanwhile porvided some insights into real-time applications based on interrupts and on DMA.

Dr. Donald Reay is a Senior lecturer in the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, UK. He holds a BSc(hons) in Electronic Engineering from the University of Sussex, an MSc in Systems Engineering from The City University, and a PhD in Control of Industrial Robots from Cambridge University. Before joining Heriot-Watt University in 1991, he worked for EMI Electronics and British Telecom. He is the author of three textbooks on digital signal processing teaching including ‘Digital Signal Processing using ARM Cortex-M4’, Wiley, 2015.